


Safehouse

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Episode Tag, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 05:01:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag for 4x11 (spoilers, obviously). Peter has a conversation afterwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safehouse

Peter waited at the wheel of the car. Neal was upstairs, talking to James -- preparing James to go into hiding. Again. Peter wasn't sure how long they'd be, but he prepared himself to wait as long as he needed to. The longer it took, the more time they'd been talking, which presumably meant that it was going well.

At last James emerged from the door. Standing on June's front walk, for a moment he looked just as he had in the photo El had taken weeks ago, when Peter still thought James was Sam and had yet to meet him face to face.

Lots of water under the bridge since then.

James opened the passenger-side door. "I hear you're my chauffeur."

"Do we need to stop and pick up anything from your place?"

James shook his head.

"Really?"

"I learned to travel light."

"That's pretty damn light," Peter murmured. 

But they were both cops, and Peter suspected they'd both had the same thought. Wherever James had been staying -- Peter still wasn't sure -- it was possible that it had been staked out. At this point, there was no telling. And if there was nothing vital, nothing that couldn't be left behind, then it was all to their advantage to let the trail go cold and leave James's enemies, whoever they were, watching an empty building.

James didn't seem to be in a talkative mood; they drove north in silence. Before they left the city, Peter stopped at a convenience store for a handful of toiletries -- toothpaste, toothbrush, razors and shaving cream. Peter left James in the car just to be on the safe side, and bought them himself after asking about preferred brands. James's preferences were cheap and simple. Not like Neal at all.

Ever since he'd learned of James's relationship to Neal, Peter couldn't help studying him, trying to see Neal overlaid on the other man's blunt features. He told himself not to do it -- they were each their own person, after all. But he'd been trying to figure out the enigma that was Neal Caffrey for close to a decade now. It was impossible not to look for missing pieces of the puzzle in James.

And it was equally impossible not to rewind the past few weeks, trying to work through how things might have been different if he'd known from the beginning. If they'd known. He told himself that it wouldn't have mattered. That he'd still have made the same decisions, and even if not, they couldn't change the past; they could only go forward.

"Things go okay with Neal?" he asked eventually.

James smiled. There was something of Neal in that smile, a flicker of surface gloss over deeper thoughts and feelings hidden beneath. "Better than I could have expected," he said. "Better than I deserve, maybe."

"You did what you thought was best," Peter said, and after a moment, "Speaking of things that are deserved, I think I owe you an apology. Neal once accused me of setting your enemies on your trail. Turns out that's exactly what I did."

"You didn't know," James said. "Knowing you can't trust the organization, that people above you don't have your best interests at heart -- for men like us, that's a hard pill to swallow. In your place, I'd probably have done the same."

_Men like us._ Peter still wasn't sure how he felt about that. It was a strange and complicated thing, what he felt for James. He'd always hated corrupt cops; it was a violation of a sacred trust, an act of wrongness that hurt him down to his bones. And yet, in James's position -- he couldn't say that he wouldn't have done the same.

_Assuming he's telling the truth._

But for now, they had to assume that. Or, rather, the consequences of assuming James was lying, and acting on that assumption, were much more dire than assuming he was telling the truth.

Mozzie's safehouse was in one of the many little towns strung along the Hudson River valley. It was a good place, Peter had to admit: far enough from town to be secluded, but populated enough that a newcomer wouldn't stand out, with tourists and commuters passing through all the time.

Getting solid directions from Mozzie had been like pulling teeth. They'd gone through a few rounds of "first you meet me at the statue, give the password, stand on one leg and hoot like a barn owl, and I'll give you the next piece of the directions" before Peter had managed to point out, enough times to get through Mozzie's skull, that it was probably in James's best interests if someone other than Mozzie knew where he was. Besides, they had to get him there somehow; the options were Mozzie driving him, or taking him on public transportation. That one finally sold the deal.

"You're not sharing this with any of your suit friends," Mozzie had said, repeatedly, until Peter wanted to strangle him. "Because there's really no point in this, otherwise. I'm burning a perfectly good safehouse for nothing."

"I recognize what's at stake here, Mozzie."

Peter still wasn't sure if Mozzie trusted him not to reveal James's location -- actually, check that, he was positive Mozzie _didn't_ trust him; he'd expect nothing less. But it was the kind of devil's bargain of necessity that the two of them had made before. Besides, Peter figured that he was taking an equal leap of faith by assuming that Mozzie's safehouse wasn't going to be anything terribly bizarre -- a pirate cave, say, or an old military silo hidden out in the wilderness like a supervillain lair.

But in reality, when they turned off Highway 9 and followed Mozzie's directions down a maze of little side streets, their destination turned out to be a perfectly ordinary little bungelow, identical to the ones on either side. Checking his car's GPS, Peter saw that it was within walking distance of a small grocery store, a couple of restaurants, and the train station for the commuter rail that ran up the valley. Gun in hand, Peter cleared the house just to be on the safe side. Aside from a slight air of mustiness, it seemed to be perfectly fine. The electricity and water were turned on. The kitchen was stocked with canned and packaged food (and copious amounts of wine, naturally). The living room contained shelves of paperback novels, and there was even a small basket of burn phones on the coffee table.

"I guess I don't have to give you the 'be careful' speech," Peter said. "You know what to do, how to get along with the locals without being noticed."

And he also had no particular hopes that James would stay there. Based on past experience, Peter suspected that the length of time it would take James to strike out on his own, looking for answers, could probably be measured in days. 

"I appreciate the help." James held out a hand; Peter took it. "Keep an eye on my kid, Burke. Don't let the bad guys get him."

It was a simple request, the sort of basic pleasantry that might have passed between two other men, two men who weren't them and didn't have the history they had. Keeping an eye on Neal was, after all, Peter's job. But there was something about the way James said it -- the naked sincerity that made Peter believe in James's honesty for this one thing, if he believed nothing else that James had told him. James trusted him in this, and it was the same kind of fragile, oddly flattering trust that he sometimes got when Mozzie let it slip that he trusted Peter in something, if only for a little while and in a certain kind of way.

"I will," he said, trying to infuse his own voice with similar sincerity, and shook James's hand.

 

***

 

He thought about driving straight home to El, but Neal's place was more or less on his way to Brooklyn anyway. It was dark, and after parking outside June's he sat at the curb for a little while, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. This might be a bad time; they'd been walking carefully around each other these past couple of weeks, and Peter didn't want to risk stepping on the comfortable, but still tentative, working relationship they'd rebuilt. And Mozzie would almost certainly be there; much as Peter hated to admit it, there was little he could offer in the way of a supportive shoulder that Mozzie wouldn't be better at, especially in this particular circumstance. Lost parents were one of the many things the two of them had in common that Peter couldn't easily relate to.

But he ought to let them know James had gotten to the safehouse without incident. Peter locked the car and headed upstairs.

He heard voices through the door of Neal's apartment, which paused for a moment when he tapped on it; then Neal said, "C'mon in."

As he'd suspected, he found Neal and Mozzie sprawled on the couch with glasses of wine. A partly completed chess game was spread out on June's table. Neal, Peter was relieved to note, looked relaxed; signs of strain and weariness were visible on his face, but they'd just gotten off a stressful undercover assignment. They'd all earned a little downtime.

"Did you find it?" Mozzie asked, in a way that implied he expected they'd been lost twelve times on the way.

"I _am_ capable of following simple directions," Peter pointed out. "Yes, we found it, and James is in place."

"I always liked that safehouse," Mozzie said wistfully. "I mourn its loss. _Requiescat in pace._ " He lifted his glass of wine in a memorial toast.

"Goes against all my instincts leaving him there alone," Peter said. "I'd feel a lot better if I could put a detail on him."

Neal pushed himself to a more vertical position, alarm flashing across his face. "No, Peter. No one but the three of us can know he's there."

"Don't worry. No official channels, I swear. Not this time. I may have Diana run up and check on him every once in a while, though. Her family has a vacation home up in the mountains; she can always say she's headed out for a weekend of skiing."

Mozzie looked disgusted. "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead, Suit."

"Was that a threat? Look, it's going to take a lot more powers of persuasion than you've got to convince me that Diana is part of a thirty-year-old conspiracy."

"No one is accusing Diana of anything," Neal said. He sounded infinitely tired, and Peter shut up; he glimpsed a look of guilt slither across Mozzie's face, too. The last thing Neal needed right now was to play mediator between his two closest friends.

"Anyway," Peter said, "I just stopped by to let you know that he's been dropped off safe and sound, and ..." He hesitated; he felt self-conscious about asking, particularly with Mozzie in the room, but he couldn't _not_ ask. "You doing okay?"

"I'm okay." Neal's smile was tired but genuine. "Go home to your wife, Peter."

Peter nodded farewell; at the door he paused and said, "Don't stay up too late. We start a new assigment tomorrow. No hangovers."

"You are never going to let me live that down, are you?" But Neal sounded playful.

"Not a chance," Peter said, and he slipped out the door with a smile on his face.


End file.
